A registered investment advisor (“RIA”) plays a critical role in managing the portfolio of an individual investor-client. The advisor must, at the very least, be able to review the asset allocation of the client, forecast the risks and benefits of alternative allocation scenarios, execute trades and transfers of the client's assets, and update the client's personal information. These responsibilities require the advisor to gather and utilize a vast array of data, from general market and business analytics to real-time asset valuation to specific client characteristics. In addition, many RIAs operate as solo practitioners or in small firms. As a result, they need general business and productivity software to manage the daily tasks and activities of running a small business.
Often, the diffuse nature of the sources providing the investment/business data and the repositories which hold it leads the advisor to rely on a multitude of different providers, each offering a discrete and separate application. These applications are frequently insulated from each other so that they cannot communicate easily or effectively to share information. Thus, the advisor must maintain separate log-in credentials for each application as well as ensure that redundant data across each application does not get out of sync. Also, the advisor must have each application available at his or her workstation, requiring time-consuming installation and configuration of each application. Access to the various software applications or suites for managing not only the portfolios of their clients but also performing routine business or productivity tasks also may be limited or costly.
Recently, cloud-based and hosted services and application software have become increasingly common to provide robust computing capability without the need for localized internal copies of hardware and software. Cloud-based and hosted applications enable the user to access desired functionality on demand, and provide the flexibility to provision a unique set of services to meet a particular user's need. However, internal, locally-installed applications are still prevalent in the marketplace and many users want to integrate these internal applications with the cloud-based and hosted offerings to have access to a custom suite of applications.
Therefore, it would be desirable to create a centralized application interface and portal that can provide one-time user authentication, presentation of data in a common context, workflow connectivity, and synchronous data management across a multitude of discrete third-party cloud-based, hosted, and internal applications. Such a centralized application interface and portal would provide cost savings and work efficiency improvements for the RIA.